Assisted Dying

Damien Egan Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Damien Egan (Kingswood) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for her introduction. I feel privileged to follow so many compelling and thoughtful contributions.

We do not have to speak to many people before we hear painful stories of the torturous and brutal deaths that people’s loved ones have had to endure, often through extreme pain. I always thought that I would be one of those people who said that a form of assisted death would not be for me or something I would encourage for loved ones. This weekend, I talked to a lot of people about this debate, and my nan—a very wise woman—shared the story of her mum, who died of breast cancer at 61 and had a very difficult death. That made me feel that what I thought before was naive. Yesterday, on a very different visit, a woman from a local “save our green spaces” group said to me that we do not treat our pets in the same way that we do people, and let them have such cruel deaths. I did not have an answer for that, which made me feel that surely we can do better.

As we move forward in this debate, I would like to add my voice to the call for us to exercise caution. With over 400 million people around the world living in countries and jurisdictions that have introduced a form of assisted dying, there is much to learn from. I do not yet know the ins and outs of parliamentary procedure, but it is something that needs considerable thought and time. On one extreme, I was taken aback by examples from the Netherlands of people ending their lives due to mental illness. I worry about assisted dying being seen as an alternative to palliative care, about people feeling like a burden on their families, and of course about coercion.

[Mrs Pauline Latham in the Chair]

However, I bring Members back to the example of Oregon, where legislation has existed for 27 years, and has not actually been extended. Assisted dying is limited with strict safeguards: people must have a terminal illness, life expectancy of less than six months, and there must be cooling-off periods. Interestingly, a third of people who start that route never take end-of-life drugs, but they are reassured that they have that choice, if needed. It would need interrogating, but in 2019, the executive director of Disability Rights Oregon said that they had not received a complaint about coercion of disabled people. It has come with very good palliative care, and more than 90% of those who died under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act 1997 were enrolled in hospice care—